Ask the Author

Some characters just come into my imagination with a name attached and it never changes. Others I name and re-name, looking for the right fit. For Frankie Laundau-Banks, I wanted her to have a gender-neutral or boyish sounding name, and then a hyphenated surname to show two sides of her background. Landau is a surname some people would perceive as Jewish while others would not. I liked that ambiguity given how protestant her school is. Banks is the most conservative-sounding name I could think of -- the name of the father in Mary Poppins.

I don't think about likeability when I'm writing; I think more about if I'm interested in the character.

I like to write in the morning which is when my brain works best. I write in longhand in lined composition books and then type up my drafts on my laptop. I have all sorts of tokens on my desk--an iron bear, a fossilized seashell, a ceramic rhino.

I don't believe in guilty pleasures, but I do unabashedly love a lot of things that other people feel guilty about, like the Kardashians and Mr. Softee and soap operas.

It’s through fiction that we connect to real people and by extension to the shared human condition. I’m interested in finding the universals through the uniqueness that is China.

One time at a reading I told the assembled crowd that my manuscript was a collection about teen girls & magic, and a guy shouted out, "It's called TWILIGHT!" Everyone laughed. I had to laugh, too, but only because I couldn't do what I wanted to do, which was breathe fire. I have a dream that wherever that guy is now, he will find himself walking through a bookstore in January 2015 and a large display of the hardcover US edition of my book, VIVIAN APPLE AT THE END OF THE WORLD, will collapse and bury him.

Don't write, think. When I get an idea for a book I spend a lot of time thinking about the plot and characters before I write a word. And I won't write anything until I have an idea for the ending.

That's the part I'm really interested in - how do you keep the audience on the side of a character who is doing awful things? I hope my characters are real enough to resonate - certainly women who have been through much of what I write about have said I have captured it, but my goal is that even if you haven't been there, you can understand how we make mistakes.

I think literary glamour is the best type of glamour, and there is nothing more glamorous in the literary world than being published in The New Yorker. Well, maybe winning the PEN/Faulkner Prize. Or egging Oprah's house with Jonathan Franzen. I suppose there are plenty of milestones still ahead of me on this path.

I think sometimes a lot of advice for young writers puts too much emphasis on daily word counts and just getting things down. I believe thinking is just as important as writing. I've had book ideas I thought about for seven or eight years before I started writing them. You must prepare to write well. You think about things you want to say and the ways you want to say them before you start. So, I guess my "not often" told advice would be it is OKAY not to write sometimes and also, that thinking is underrated.

Q: What's your favorite nautical term? Dan Lopez: So many to choose from! Did you know a smokestack is called a Charlie Noble on a ship? And that the word "tack" has at least three different meanings on a boat? My favorite, though, has got to be "baggywrinkle," which is basically a bunch of old rope that's been shredded and turned into a kind of garland that gets wrapped around cables to prevent chaffing on a sail. Next time you see an old-timey sailing ship look for the dirty brown things halfway up the sail. That's a "baggywrinkle." Make sure to point it out to your friends. They'll think you're cool because knowing esoteric sailing terms is cool, right?